I'm not checking my brain at the door, but I'm also not asking the church that I attend to,
"well, you got to read all my books first, and then we'll talk about whether I could be a member."
Come on. That's just ridiculous.
What, if any, religious affiliation would you say you best align with and why?
What denomination is probably the best term to use?
Would you say you best align with and why?
That's actually a difficult question because I mean, I will freely admit that I already know
that there's no place I could go that I'm going to be completely comfortable with.
And there's also no place I could go that would be completely comfortable with me.
So I have I have dispensed caring about it.
My attitude is that wherever I am or would go, try to do something useful.
I mean, I say it all the time in the podcast and I actually mean it.
It's not just like shtick. We're literally just here to try to do something useful.
Very small list of things I would shoot at. You know, the things that alter the gospel,
that alter Christology, again, these core things that are essential to what the gospel is.
I'll shoot at that stuff all day long and, you know, would feel good about it.
But I could function in just about any situation and sort of grit my teeth
and not like it in certain respects and then really appreciate it in other respects.
So, that's a long way of saying I haven't had an affiliation for, gosh...
You know, I guess the only real affiliation I had that I took seriously,
like "I'm a this..." was right after I became a believer in high school,
and my early college years, my initial context was a fundamental Baptist church.
And I still have really good friends in that movement,
but they also will not have me in to speak.
And I'm fine with that. I don't need you to do that,
to know that that we can do useful things together or we can be a blessing.
So I have just literally dispensed with it all. So I don't really know.
I mean, that's the best way I can I can answer that. And that also tells you why.
I'm not checking my brain at the door, but I'm also not asking the church that I attend to:
"Well, you got to read all my books first and then we'll talk about whether I could be a member."
Come on. You know, that's just ridiculous.
So I'm looking for people who their heart's in the right place.
They're trying to do the Great Commission.
I mean, the Great Commission is still the thing that ought to orient us.
It's not our political involvement. It's not really good programs that we have.
It's not starting schools. It's not producing curriculum. It's not producing music.
If these things are not resulting in being more efficient fishers of men,
they're a waste of time, and resources, to be honest with you.
So, you know, that's just the way I look at it. That's the way I look at church.
It's the way I look at denominations. I'll tell you what I miss:
I miss liturgy. I'd like a little liturgy because I don't have it where I'm at now.
So I kind of miss that. Like this past Easter,
I've just grown used to coming into church on Easter morning,
and it's the time worn thousands of years.
«He has risen. He has risen indeed.» I didn't hear that this year. It's just not part of this tradition.
So there are little things like that, that it's like, I wish I could tweak this or that.
But at the end of the day I can't tweak that.
And if I'm going to obsess over that, then that's going to be a distraction
directed against me, that will prevent me from doing the next useful thing.
That's literally all I'm about. It's got to be evangelism, it's got to be discipleship.
It has to be useful to the church, and "useful to the church" means
not bringing in lots of revenue so we can go build an ark or something.
We're not doing that. We're doing the Great Commission. It's real simple.
I can remember in grad school, right when I determined that I need to write,
I wasn't calling it Unseen Realm, it had a different title,
but I remember thinking, and it wasn't an appeal to my own vainglory here.
It's like, if you do this, you're going to lose friends, you're going to lose jobs.
It's going to be hard to land somewhere.
It's like, are you sure you want to do that? You know, I couldn't shake it.
People ask me, why did I write Unseen Realm? I have a one word answer for that: guilt.
It's that simple, because I knew I'm sitting there in my little cubicle as a doctoral student,
rediscovering my Bible again for the first time and being hit with the thought:
99% of people in church will never see this stuff. They will never have this experience.
There's just something wrong with that. So, yep, we're going to do that.
It'll hurt, but I'm going to assume that the Lord has some plan here and that will be OK.
Simplistic assumption, but that's just kind of where it was.